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This study investigated the phrasal complexity of academic writing from a diachronic perspective. Specifically, based on a corpus of 1,920 research articles (RAs) from soft disciplines (education and economics) and hard disciplines (medicine and mechanical engineering), this study examined the diachronic changes and disciplinary variations in the phrasal complexity of RAs from 1970 to 2020. Nine noun phrase modifiers from Biber et al.’s (2011) framework were adopted for the measurement of phrasal complexity. Results of diachronic analysis reveal an increasing trend in the phrasal complexity of RAs in the four disciplines over the past 50 years, and this trend is more pronounced in the hard disciplines than in the soft disciplines. In addition, the results show significant disciplinary differences in the use of noun phrase modifiers at most time points, with more clausal modifiers in the soft disciplines and more phrasal modifiers in the hard disciplines. These observed diachronic and disciplinary patterns of use of noun phrase modifiers in RAs are possibly associated with the evolving discipline-related epistemological characteristics. These findings have useful implications for EAP writing research and pedagogy.

There has been a substantial amount of research on heritage language acquisition and diachronic change. Although recent work has increasingly pointed to parallels between those two areas, it remains unclear how systematic these are. In this paper, we provide a bird's eye view, illustrating how patterns of diachronic change are mirrored in heritage language grammars. In doing so, we focus on one of the best-described grammaticalization processes – namely, the formation of articles from demonstratives and numerals, reviewing studies on heritage varieties which mirror those processes. Based on this review, we make two main points: that change in heritage language can be predicted based on established diachronic scenarios, and that heritage languages often amplify incipient changes in the baseline. After discussing a number of attested changes in a bilingual context, we identify directions for future research in the domain of determiners in heritage languages.

Linguistic expressions of confusion, namely confusion markers, construe discrepancies between an academic author’s prior knowledge and the information received. These emotive responses motivate knowledge-seeking behaviors to dissolve cognitive incongruities and are inherently connected with knowledge-making. Limited research has, however, examined how they partake in knowledge construction and dissemination in academic writing. Drawing on a frame-based analytical approach, this study investigated how an academic author’s disciplinary background and time of publication may mediate the use of confusion markers in 640 research articles sampled from four disciplines. The corpus-based analyses were complemented by insights from 16 specialists to explore how considerations underlying their use of confusion markers shaped their academic writing. The findings indicated that the overall use of confusion markers changed over time and that disciplinary background and time of publication were significant predictors of several frame elements. The observed disciplinary and diachronic patterns of use can be explained in terms of epistemological orientations, developments in the academic world such as increasing disciplinary specialization and growing interdisciplinary research leading to a broadening of readership, and stiff competition in scholarly publication.

This study presents the result of a cross-disciplinary and diachronic examination of cohesive devices used in high citation research article (HCRA) titles, a hitherto less-explored subgenre of academic discourse. Based on Halliday and Matthiessen’s ( 2014 ) Cohesion Model, the research analyzed the employment of connectors in a self-constructed corpus of 30,000 HCRA titles from disciplines of Biology, Chemistry, Linguistics, and Music from 1980 to 2023. Comparisons of disciplinary and diachronic changes of connectors were made in two-way multivariate analyses of variance (MANOVA), and follow-up analyses of variance (ANOVA). Major findings indicate that discipline, as compared to period, is the determinant of cohesion in HCRA titles, albeit in medium effect size. The use of Extension and Enhancement prevail HCRA titles, suggesting an exponential increase of sophistication and comprehensiveness of information in the curation and dissemination of scientific knowledge. Specifically, cohesion of HCRA titles is predominantly realized by additive, temporal, and causal connectors with sharp contrasts between soft and hard sciences, indicating longer titles with these connectors attract readers by harnessing their familiarity of disciplinary knowledge. Quantitative characterization of cohesion in HCRA titles shed light on how expert writers coherently organize titles to maximize informativeness and research impact, thereby contributing pedagogically to academic writing for English for Academic and Specific Purposes, and empirically for the research on the predictability of citation impacts.

Crop diversity underpins the productivity, resilience and adaptive capacity of agriculture. Loss of this diversity, termed crop genetic erosion, is therefore concerning. While alarms regarding evident declines in crop diversity have been raised for over a century, the magnitude, trajectory, drivers and significance of these losses remain insufficiently understood. We outline the various definitions, measurements, scales and sources of information on crop genetic erosion. We then provide a synthesis of evidence regarding changes in the diversity of traditional crop landraces on farms, modern crop cultivars in agriculture, crop wild relatives in their natural habitats and crop genetic resources held in conservation repositories. This evidence indicates that marked losses, but also maintenance and increases in diversity, have occurred in all these contexts, the extent depending on species, taxonomic and geographic scale, and region, as well as analytical approach. We discuss steps needed to further advance knowledge around the agricultural and societal significance, as well as conservation implications, of crop genetic erosion. Finally, we propose actions to mitigate, stem and reverse further losses of crop diversity.

Metaverse brings about the reshaping of the playful human being (homo ludens) into the digitalised human being (homo digitalis). Transcendence (homo transcendentalis) has become digitalised by the power of technologised options (optimalisation of our being human) and fictive forms of sublimations (avatars). Due to, inter alia, Facebook and Instagram, a spirituality of diachronic networking and digital immediacy, set in: I start to exist through and via (Greek: dia) the digitalised other. Thus, the following research question: How could metaverse thinking contribute to a multidimensional reinterpretation of religious spirituality?

The availability of large annotated corpora from social media and the development of powerful classification approaches have contributed in an unprecedented way to tackle the challenge of monitoring users’ opinions and sentiments in online social platforms across time. Such linguistic data are strongly affected by events and topic discourse, and this aspect is crucial when detecting phenomena such as hate speech, especially from a diachronic perspective. We address this challenge by focusing on a real case study: the “Contro l’odio” platform for monitoring hate speech against immigrants in the Italian Twittersphere. We explored the temporal robustness of a BERT model for Italian (AlBERTo), the current benchmark on non-diachronic detection settings. We tested different training strategies to evaluate how the classification performance is affected by adding more data temporally distant from the test set and hence potentially different in terms of topic and language use. Our analysis points out the limits that a supervised classification model encounters on data that are heavily influenced by events. Our results show how AlBERTo is highly sensitive to the temporal distance of the fine-tuning set. However, with an adequate time window, the performance increases, while requiring less annotated data than a traditional classifier.

Contrary to the widespread notion that linguistic signs are arbitrary, researchers have consistently demonstrated the existence of sound symbolism in language, providing evidence for non-arbitrariness in sound-meaning associations. However, much evidence of this kind is based on a limited subset of vocabulary and falls short of systematically demonstrating the pervasive nature of sound symbolism and, especially, its central, rather than marginal, role in language. Furthermore, a historical perspective is lacking to determine whether sound symbolism is merely a feature of archaic languages or has remained a significant element throughout the evolution of languages. This research pioneers a diachronic analysis of sound symbolism in Chinese using historical rhyme books to trace its presence on the vocabulary scale. Employing natural language processing techniques along with statistical methods, it investigates whether phonologically related Chinese characters, as documented in rhyme books, also demonstrate semantic congruence, which would suggest that the phonological aspects of characters are inherently meaningful and hence indicate a systematic, rather than random or purely arbitrary relationship between sounds and meanings. Statistically significant results from our analysis of all four analyzed rhyme books confirm the robustness of sound symbolism over a large span of the Chinese language continuum, and a granular analysis of a representative one of them further reveals that sound symbolism is manifest across various levels of phonological organization, including initials, finals, etc. This study initiates an innovative combination of traditional materials with novel techniques to enrich and expand existing knowledge about sound symbolism, providing both methodological advancement and empirical insights.

Recent years have witnessed a “discursive turn” in image construction studies. This article explores the linguistic features of image construction. We provide a corpus-based diachronic study of the distribution of modality in The Reports to the 16 th to 20 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China and unravel the role of the modal verbs in conceptualizing China’s images in The Reports . To analyze the national image, we need to understand how the various elements in The Reports , i.e., actors, actions, and situations, are not only depicted but also intricately interconnected in terms of volition, obligation, and prediction. The diverse national image profiles can be discerned through the lens of how the actors perceive the situations in relation to what is deemed desirable, committed, possible, important, and expected in the context of The Reports . The study finds that The Reports , based on the frequency, value, category and translation of the modal verbs, can project different image profiles of the nation, such as a reliable planner, a committed and powerful leader, and an active participant showing respect for others.